


but paradise had none of those things

by missdulcerosea



Category: Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, F/F, POV Second Person, Post-Rebellion Story, metaphors galore!!!, vent fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-22 20:23:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,751
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21082550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missdulcerosea/pseuds/missdulcerosea
Summary: This is a story about a girl - a girl who lived with a ghost in a cage disguised as a castle.





	but paradise had none of those things

There’s a castle that sits atop a hill. It is pristine white, with golden gates and fluted columns to help it stand. It rests beneath a cloudless blue sky, and while there’s surely more beyond the horizon it seems as though the rolling green hills stretch on and on and on.

Your favorite part of the castle is the garden. You can walk down the sun-warmed path decorated with trees on each side, look at the flowers singing with color and guess what sorts of flowers they are. But sometimes you want to sit inside of the pavilion away from the sunlight, avertying your eyes from light and colors to focus on your book.

The strangest part, though, is it never rains. There are no gray, unwanted days. The castle’s stuck in a perpetual state of spring.

* * *

You are not the only one who lives in this castle.

There is another girl that wanders the corridors. She is a ghost, with ivory-pale skin and long, lustrous dark hair. She is always dressed in black, an aberration amidst the warmth and sunlight of the castle.

You try talking to the girl. But as soon as you open your mouth she drifts away or lowers her faded violet eyes.

Give up on talking to her, you tell yourself. She’ll never listen She never does.

But you don’t want to be alone. You don’t want to talk to yourself and have the echoes or silence sit listening.

* * *

The girl still avoids talking, but she is less of a ghost these days. You’re sitting alone in your pavilion and she steps in uninvited. She clutches a worn brown book in her hands. When she sits down it is not next to you, but in the most sun-drenched corner of the pavilion across from you.

As always, she wears black. There is, however, a spot of color on her that you had not noticed before: A single dark cerise ribbon tied to her hair. She doesn’t look up at you and instead turns the pages to her book, which are so thin-looking you wonder if they might just tear or crumble in her hands. You think that maybe there was a title—a picture, even—on the cover of her book, but with how she has the book spread against her lap you can’t see.

Then you decide to ask what she is reading, and she answers you.

“Sleeping Beauty.”

Her voice is quiet and borderline monotone when she speaks. You don’t ask her name (and you aren’t even certain of your name either) but you ask her if you can read her book when she is finished. 

“You can read it now if you want. You can do as you like here.”

You don’t understand what she means by that, but then she closes the book shut with a thump and slides it over to you. 

You know the story (a princess doomed to death, curse softened by a kindly fairy, and a prince is the one who saves her in the end), but you still take your time anyways. You savor the words like berries in your mind, taking your time to taste each one till you realize that your fingers have gone all purple-stained and sticky. It is not a long book, but you still turn each page slowly.

When you look up the girl is gone and you are alone.

* * *

The girl starts talking to you more. Sometimes she’ll answer your questions, but if you ask about the castle she does not answer. Sometimes she’ll mutter things to herself; she will say things like “This won’t last forever” and “What’ll happen if she knows?” But no matter how much you press her, she won’t say anything either.

You want to read your book at tea time, but your stomach growls and the table is weighed down with treats: A porcelain pot still steaming with fresh-brewed tea, cookies dusted in sugar, puffy scones drenched in clotted cream and jam, thin slices of cake drizzled in icing, strawberries, cherries, orange slices, and even ice cream that melts pink and white in bowls.

You pour yourself some tea and lift a slice of cake messily frosted with chocolate onto your plate. The girl in black sits across from you. She has a teacup balanced on her plate but she does not take anything to eat or drink. You think to ask why, but there is a part of you that believes she will answer with silence, so there’s no point to asking.

“Do you want to go to the library after I finish?” You finish your cake and even though there’s chocolate smeared on your fingertips to lick clean, you still make yourself wipe off the stains with a napkin.

“Do you want to?” She asks.

“Yes.”

“Then we can go.”

There is a pause as you scrape off the last few crumbs from your plate to eat. You’ve finished.

* * *

How long has it been since you came here? You wonder to yourself. Did you even arrive in the first place? If you haven’t been here the whole time, then how did you get here? And how long have you been here?

You know that you’ve been here long enough to have explored most of the castle’s nooks and crannies. Days melt seamlessly into night and it’s always the same no matter where you wander between the hours from when you open your eyes to when your head hits the pillow. As soon as you want to go somewhere your feet lead you, you just have to follow.

You have questions to ask but you get no answers. The girl (and you think since she is the only other one here, she’ll be the only one able to give you answers) won’t answer all of your questions. When you ask what you think is the wrong thing she becomes a ghost again.

And it is only now that you realize that you are the opposite of this girl. While you can’t keep your questions from bubbling up out of your throat, she only speaks to you when spoken to. While the hair ribbon she wears is dark red, yours are yellow like sunflowers. She wanders through the house clothed in black, all of the clothes you have to wear are all white and trimmed in lace.

But even if she is a ghost, she is not the kind that haunts you because she wants something. She haunts you to keep you company.

You’re both at the pavilion again tonight. The moon is out tonight, full and wide and white. The garden that was tinted gold in the daylight now shimmers in silver. She is with you again tonight, watching the solitary fireflies buzz around the flowers.

When you press your lips to her forehead, you cup her face in her hands and her skin is wet with tears. You don’t know why she cries, but she closes her eyes and pretends she isn’t crying when she finally kisses you back. There are a lot of things you don’t know, and a lot of things she won’t tell you. But you have, in a way, learned. You have learned that there are certain answers she will not give you.

The girl starts talking to you more—candy-sweet words that aren’t the things you expected, but words that are warm and musical all the same.

She tells you that she loves you very much (just as much as you do, because you told her after the kiss). She says that she hopes you’re happy (you think you are). She says that she thinks you’re beautiful (you don’t think you are, but you accept her words). 

Because she talks to you more, you think of questions to ask her. And one day you ask her if you can leave the castle. 

Something comes over her, a flash of a storm in summer. But she sets her mouth into a solemn little line once she realizes you notice her grimacing. 

“You can’t,” she says. You ask why and she goes silent again.

You don’t escape or even try to. You just want to know if there is really nothing more out there than green hills and faultlessly blue sky.

When you reach the palace entrance your fingers latch onto the gates. You don’t have the keys and you don’t know where they may be hidden, but you look to the world beyond. Birds titter overhead, wind makes the trees with lush green leaves shudder in the breeze.

_Wait…_

The gates gleaming brassy gold stretch far past the entrance. You follow it around and realize that the “gates” circle the whole castle. And then you wonder—no, you know—if they are gates at all. It’s not a gate to keep other people out. It’s a cage to keep you in.

* * *

You tear the ribbons out of your hair and pluck a striped carnation from the garden. She stops by again like she did earlier and her eyes go wide when she sees your hair brushing past your shoulders, free from the ribbons holding it in place.

When you hand her the carnation she nods. You realize that she looks even more like a ghost than usual today—skin stretched tightly over her cheekbones, eyes hollow and lined with dark circles. The ghost accepts the carnation and inhales. 

_I’ll never understand_, you realize. _I’ll never understand._

She takes the carnation and tucks it away, but before she leaves she ties your hair into pigtails again. The ribbons she uses this time are not yellow, but red. Red like the one she wears. Then you’re alone in the garden, and the buzzing of insects alongside the calm of the garden rocks you into slumber.

You wake up at night and you see the girl’s silhouette, dancing jerkily in the garden. Her arms are raised high above her head, and you realize that she’s the one behind it all. She is the one who is trying to keep you in, and you thought her to be something more than a friend. You don’t know why she wants to keep you in. (She’d probably say it’s to protect you, but there’s more to it than that.)

And as much as you think there’s more for you beyond the castle’s high walls, you can’t go. Because the red thread ties you both together, and you don’t have the scissors to snip it in two.

**Author's Note:**

> i am not feeling great physically OR emotionally. won't get too into it but i wrote this to vent.
> 
> thanks for reading. comments are appreciated.


End file.
